I'm a longtime Google manager. Here's what I wrote on an internal Google mailing list:

There are no blacklists.

If you trace back where this notion came from, it was a claim that there was one manager who allegedly kept a list of people they didn't want to work with. Seems plausible. But that's it. If one wants to call that a blacklist, OK, but it shouldn't be interpreted as an institutionalized phenomenon at Google.

There's a time lag between when the USPTO issues a patent and when Google receives the data from the USPTO. It'll be live soon.

-Jon (Google Patents guy)