One critical difference between the wedding photo example and recorded music, movies, etc. is the size of the audience. Your clients pay your fee because the product is valuable to them uniquely. So who pays the fee for a product that is valuable to millions?

I can accept this. That said, here are some details I probably should have included in my original post:
1) My field is very competitive (only about 5-10% of Ph.D. applicants get in to an APA-accredited program).
2) I do know the major players in my field; I have a list of favorite articles. And some tiny percentage of my peers will be able to choose a famous researcher to work with. The rest of us peruse faculty webpages at 2nd-tier schools and look for approximate matches. Keywords are sufficient to get down to a useful list of potential supervisors.
3) Since 99% of us are doing this, I thought it would be useful to have this info in one database, or perhaps use a fancy webcrawler to achieve the same result.
4) I'm a psychology student, not a programmer, which is why I haven't built this myself. I was secretly hoping some enterprising slashdotter would take my idea and run with it. :)

This is really helpful. Any tips on finding out some of this meta-information on potential supervisors? If I email their current grad students, will I get honest answers?

Thanks for this. There is a particular challenge that I probably should have mentioned in my original post, which is the extraordinarily low acceptance rates of Ph.D. applicants in clinical psychology. Only about 5-10% of applicants get accepted to APA-accredited programs. For that reason, identifying the best & brightest researchers in my field (whose names I do in fact know) would not be a good strategy unless my GRE scores were astronomical and I had several years of research experience. What makes a lot more sense is filtering through the list of faculty at APA-accredited schools and seeing how similar their research is to what I'm interested in-- that's more or less what I was suggesting in my post. It's been interesting to see how wrongheaded that approach seems to folks here.

I agree that talking to faculty members is the best way to get the info I need-- this is a little sticky, however, since my school has a Ph.D. program that I will be applying to. I don't want to be written off because I seem eager to be elsewhere... I would much rather make that decision myself than have it made for me. If that sounds a bit paranoid it's just the pervasive influence of the competition in this field. All my colleagues are completely freaked out about getting in anywhere.

These comments have actually been quite helpful and have given me a lot of perspective. Thanks for weighing in on this.

anti-ports act? not anti-porn?