Google 5gram corpus has unreasonable 5grams

In the context of something completely unrelated, I was looking for a fairly general pattern in the Google 1TB corpus. In particular, I was looking for verbs that are sort of transitive. I did a quick grep for 5grams of the form "the SOMETHING BLAHed the SOMETHING." Or, more specifically:

    grep -i '^the [a-z][a-z]* [a-z][a-z]*ed the [a-z]*'

I then took these, lower cased them, and then merged the counts. Here are the top 25, sorted and with counts:

     1  101500  the surveyor observed the use
    2   30619  the rivals shattered the farm
    3   27999  the link entitled the names
    4   22928  the trolls ambushed the dwarfs
    5   22843  the dwarfs ambushed the trolls
    6   21427  the poet wicked the woman
    7   15644  the software helped the learning
    8   13481  the commission released the section
    9   12273  the mayor declared the motion
   10   11046  the player finished the year
   11   10809  the chicken crossed the road
   12    8968  the court denied the motion
   13    8198  the president declared the bill
   14    7890  the board approved the following
   15    7848  the bill passed the house
   16    7373  the fat feed the muscle
   17    7362  the report presented the findings
   18    7115  the committee considered the report
   19    6956  the respondent registered the domain
   20    6923  the chairman declared the motion
   21    6767  the court rejected the argument
   22    6307  the court instructed the jury
   23    5962  the complaint satisfied the formal
   24    5688  the lord blessed the sabbath
   25    5486  the bill passed the senate

What the heck?! First of all, the first one is shocking, but maybe you could convince me. How about numbers 4 and 5? "The trolls ambushed the dwarfs" (and vice versa)? These things are the fourth and fifth most common five grams matching my pattern on the web? "The poet wicked the woman"? What does "wicked" even mean? And yet these all beat out "The bill passed the house" and "The court instructed the jury". But then #23: "The prince compiled the Mishna"??? (#30 is also funny: "the matrix reloaded the matrix" is an amusing segmentation issue.)

If we do a vanilla google search for the counts of some of these, we get:

     1     10900  the surveyor observed the use
    4      7750  the trolls ambushed the dwarfs
    5      7190  the dwarfs ambushed the trolls
    6     ZERO!  the poet wicked the woman
   15  20200000  the bill passed the house
   22   3600000  the court instructed the jury

This just flabbergasts me. I'm told that lots of people have expressed worries over the Google 1TB corpus, but have never actually heard anything myself... And never seen anything myself.

Does anyone have an explanation for these effects? How can I expect to get anything done with such ridiculous data!

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