I am working on a research paper on the abundance of knowledge bases
and intelligence gathering in the 21st century. As a part of the paper
I am providing an analysis of such services. Answers.Google.Com is one
of the services I will be focusing on. I am looking for relevant
companies that operate off of a similar business model (on any scale,
primarily internationally, however domestic is okay) to that of
answers.google.com. In other words I have these questions.

1. Who is Answers.Google.Com main competition? (other than free
internet searches performed by the end user.)

2. Are there any private companies out there that focus on
intelligence gathering ( think ?private CIA? but not so ?spy like?)

3. Are there any ?intelligence networks? that provide opinion rather
than fact for a cost per answer?

4. Any other information you can provide me on ?knowledge/information
for pay? services

Please feel free to clarify this if need be.

A little bit 'itsy bitsy' as compared to the scope of your original
question, but you maybe interested in:

www.cooperativeresearch.org as an (admittedly not for profit)
organisation in the vein of 2.

also www.topicmaps.org is a technology in this space you should be aware of.