After reading this post, the first thing pop up in my mind is that, we are simply not ready to talk about the search algorithm yet. Although searching algorithm is important, don't forget, an efficient searching algorithm always requires a specific and efficient way of organizing your data.
If your data is poorly organized, no searching algorithm will be able to fully demo its power.
There are lots of choices over there, from a simple queue to a balanced binary tree, ... If I am doing this, I would refer back to those books I read during the good university time, those helps in this situation.
After you picked your data structure, the way your data is going to be organized. The next thing is to find and define a way to represent your data structure in Perl.
As we don't really know what the nature of your data is, it is hard for us to give any detailed suggestion on data struecture, not to say the Perl representation, but I DO seriously suggest you to look into the available data structures that fit your purposes and your data's charactristics.
Finally, it comes the time for you to determine your searching algorithm.