Rather than looking at data from the last 200 or 500 years of English, you might want to focus on just the last 20-30 years, and that's fine -- -- you can just use the decades that interest you. The following is the size for each decade from the 1900s-2000s (in billions of words):

Dataset	1500- 1799	1800- 1899	1900- 1909	1910- 1919	1920- 1929	1930- 1939	1940- 1949	1950- 1959	1960- 1969	1970- 1979	1980- 1989	1990- 1999	2000- 2009	1980- 2009
American	0.04	22.8	7.5	10.1	7.1	5.8	6.2	8.1	13.2	14.0	15.5	19.8	26.9	62.2
British	0.77	11.4	2.1	0.9	1.3	1.1	0.8	1.5	1.8	1.8	2.1	2.9	5.4	10.5
1 million	0.64	32.2	5.3	4.8	4.9	5.0	5.1	5.4	5.2	4.9	5.3	5.5	4.8	15.6
Fiction	0.32	12.3	3.4	3.2	2.9	2.4	2.4	3.5	4.7	5.7	8.2	12.3	29.4	49.8
Spanish	0.32	3.8	0.9	0.8	0.9	1.3	2.1	2.6	3.9	5.4	6.3	7.7	8.9	23.0

If you want to just use the 1980s-2000s, for example, you'll still have a 62 billion word corpus, which is about 150 times as large as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and 600 times as large as the British National Corpus. There's really nothing remotely like this Google Books corpus in terms of size.

To use just a portion of the corpus, just select the decades that interest you in [SECTION 1] of the search form. For example, while you could search the entire corpus for the phrase increasingly [ADJ], you could limit this to just the 1980s-2000s or even just the 2000s. Make sure that you clear the [SECTIONS: SHOW] box in the search form, so that you only see the data from the desired decades.