My first thought was that the creator used a search library that filters common words by default, but the search code is all in the page and doesn't do that.

My second thought was that the 10k word corpus doesn't include those most common words. But it does.

Then I realized that the creator filtered them out. The page does say "7931 words", and the title here on HN says "10k* most common". The original corpus has exactly 10,000 words.

https://github.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/blob/d0...

The first 21 include all four we've mentioned:

the, of, and, to, a, in, for, is, on, that, by, this, with, i, you, it, not, or, be, are, from