PHP/MySQL programmer required for building a search facility into an existing site

PHP/MySQL programmer required for building a comprehensive search facility into an existing website.


About Us:

We are an online talent directory consisting of over 145,000 members who each have their own profile page detailing their skills, expertise, experience, physical characteristics etc. At the moment we are able to filter all of these people with just a handful of options.

The Brief:

We need a comprehensive filter and seach facility designed into our site so that Casting Directors are able to specify exactly what they're after and returning all members who match their criteria rather than the current manual search of 1,000s of people. All the information that we wish to be in the search facility is currently in the database, this job is about creating a search facility of this large amount of data.

We'd like the filter that's in place to include a few other options, such as ethnicity, height, hair colour etc and then the ability for a far more in-depth search to be done (accents, skills etc) with the results able to be saved for future use.

For example: If someone is looking for a blue eyed somali who speaks dutch and plays the clarinet and has experience in commercials we want that to be possible.

This search facility needs to be designed so as not to slow the whole site down and in a way that whilst comprehensive is simple for people to use. This may involve jquery and memcache and if so you'll also need to have these skills.