I thought this was going to be due to some expression coming into popularity, but I notice the same phenomenon with almost every bigram starting with "love" that I try,
If anything, though, I feel like this may be due to a changing in the makeup of the corpus in recent years. Many queries with common words seem to exhibit the same spike after around 2000 (try "hate", "fly", "ten", "blue", etc.) perhaps the size of the average vocabulary is smaller in the newer corpus documents, in which case the overall proportion of common words would be expected to increase.
For older content, they focus on what's available in libraries so perhaps old content that's survived in libraries typically has a richer vocabulary.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+makes&ye... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+with&yea... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+me&year_... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=love+you&year... http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=you+love&year...
etc.
If anything, though, I feel like this may be due to a changing in the makeup of the corpus in recent years. Many queries with common words seem to exhibit the same spike after around 2000 (try "hate", "fly", "ten", "blue", etc.) perhaps the size of the average vocabulary is smaller in the newer corpus documents, in which case the overall proportion of common words would be expected to increase.
For older content, they focus on what's available in libraries so perhaps old content that's survived in libraries typically has a richer vocabulary.
Or maybe we just love more.