can I find out how many times in a given time period that a specific
word (ie feather board) has been used on the google search engine
query

You can't. Except for Google Zeitgeist, Google does not release such
data to the public.
://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

The key here is "has been used" and I don't have an answer to that
one. However, if you want to know how often a phrase "is used"
(present tense), you can sign up with Google Adwords and advertise it.
I do this fequently to check actual vs. theoretical usage, and it has
the side benefit of actually sending traffic to your site:-)