Modern replacement for checking frequency tables?

Use a professionally created corpus, like the Corpus of Contemporary American English. You get much more reliable data and examples, plus you can do sophisticated part-of-speech searches.

A better way is to find a word used in texts. Most language experts analyze books, newspapers and magazines that are edited before they are published rather than taking on the Internet as a whole. You can choose what countries and target demographics by this method as well. I would go for quality over quanity otherwise your numbers are meaningless. The word "friend" is frequently misspelled "freind". It is a common error, but not standard English.