I think it's worth keeping in mind that that presentation (and accompanying papers) came out in the spring/summer of 2006. Google Patents didn't appear until December of that year [0], and the USPTO certainly didn't have an online search or API back then (it does now [1]).

The information was always there, but it's only become easily accessible in the past few years. To me, that speaks tremendously towards Battaglia's research.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents

[1]: http://assignment.uspto.gov/