The following links provide a good overview of the features of the corpus.  Each link inputs values into the search interface and runs the query against the billion word corpus (i.e. these are not "canned" results). You might want to note which options have been selected in the form, and then modify the values to create your own queries.

The NOW corpus (News on the Web) contains about billion words of data from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010 to the present time. More importantly, the corpus grows by about 6-10 million words each night, 200-220  million words of data each month (from about 300,000 - 400,000 new articles), or about 1.8 - 2.0 billion words each year. Although there are a handful of other resources that track recent changes in English (for example the English Trends corpus from Sketch Engine), we would argue that NOW is the most robust monitor corpus of English.

With this corpus, you can see what is happening within the last month or two -- not just 10 or 20 years ago. The following are just a handful of words that probably would only be in a corpus that includes very recent texts: Brexit, swatting, mommy porn, catfishing, selfie stick, or fracklog. The preceding links are for individual words and phrases. But of course you can look for "open-ended" strings like digital NOUN or data NOUN as well as words matching substrings, such as *fest, *sexual*, *phobia, *alypse, *geddon, or  *ware.

The preceding searches show the frequency by year. But you can also see the frequency of words and phrases by month, to see when a particular topic was discussed the most since 2010. For example, fidget spinnner(s), fake news, or pandemic.

It is also possible to compare across different "sections" of the corpus -- either time or country. Comparing time periods, for example, *gate (last three years vs 2010-2011) (notice the new "scandals") or data NOUN (last three years vs 2010-2011). As far as comparing countries, take for example *ism (GB vs IN), hard NOUN (US vs AU), or synonyms of expensive (GB/IE vs US/CA).

Finally, it is possible to quickly and easily create "virtual corpora" within a given corpus (like NOW). For example, the following searches could create virtual corpora based on the following words: bonds, rebound (i.e. basketball), or electron (click on the pages in the results to see that these texts really do deal with that topic). You can also create virtual corpora based on date and source (e.g. New York Times). For example, you could create a corpus based on texts from September 2015 dealing with refugees in Europe. You can then search within the virtual corpora, such as finding the word asylum in this virtual corpus (click on the link in the results set; all of the hits are from Sep 2015). Finally, you can quickly and easily generate "keyword" lists from the virtual corpora (see a sample keyword list from the refugee virtual corpus). For a detailed discussion, click on TEXTS/VIRTUAL in the search form.
 

Note: click on the links in the search form for more information on the format of search strings, how to find collocates ("nearby words", which provide great insight into the meaning and usage of words), comparing between words (e.g. contrasting words near small and little or Democrats and Republicans), and how to generate re-sortable Keyword in Context lines (to see the patterns in which a word occurs).