Google Answers was awesome. It was a fantastic service that gave you access to high-quality researchers at a fair price.

It's not a super-high-margin business I'm guessing, and it doesn't scale well, but it would be a great lifestyle business I think.

Perhaps you contract with PhD candidates throughout the world. They're smart, they're great at research, and often they are getting paid like $15 an hour-ish (obviously this varies a TON depending on where they live in the world).

So a customer pays anywhere from $15 - $500, depending on the quality of research they want. 80% of that goes to the researcher, and the service keeps 20% to pay bills and turn a profit.

It seems like to start you'd just need to find a handful of smart people (PhD's is one idea, maybe there are other ways, perhaps even just smart people from communities like HN etc.) that were ready to take the jobs. RentAResearcher.org and .net are both available.... would love to see this built.