Hello dan667, welcome to perlmonks. :)
I'm not sure how Perl related your question really is, but since this is a Perl site, I'm going to give you a perl answer.
I think you are on the right track with esentially defining some meta fields about the items you are storing. There are probably more advanced ways to do something like this, but for a beginner, the more simple your solution, the better its chances of succeeding.
Anyway, after you've set up your database, you'll need to set up a form that requests the parameters that will be searched on. This form will post to a CGI application, and that's where Perl actually starts to come into action.
As far as parsing the input, my first suggestion is that you go learn about the CGI.pm module. Once you've gotten your form parameters in, you'll need to actually execute a query on your database. That means you need to go learn about DBI. Once you've mastered that, you really have everything you'll need to put the search together and display the results, but you'll probably be doing a lot of work that other people have already done. If you want to construct a search query for your database with the least amount of effort, I suggest you look at DBIx::Recordset. I've had a lot of good results with that module.
Anyway, that should get you started. I'm sure you will have more queestions as your project progresses.
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