Website CMS Programmer required

We have an Idea for website and need some recommendation for the best way to go about setting it up before we source programmers.

It is to be a search engine that gathers information from particular sites (many and various) and will then allow members to access their particular breakdown of the results via a personal login or have it sent out to them via rss daily.

What would be the best language to set up the cms content in for rapid retrieval and what would be the best way to present the data to each member.-cache every members data before they require it or via a particular program at the time? Speed is VERY important.

As you can tell we are swimming out of our depth even explaining it.

Is there anybody that could point me in the direction of somebody, that can help us define, what we need to ask a programmer to do and the best way to get it done?

Any and all help very much appreciated.

Biller

It depends on what your resources are. Dedicated server or shared hosting? 10mbit 100mbit connection? And so on..

If your resources are good enough I would rule all that with PHP, if you need to tweak I would test other interpreters as well, Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc.

And again it depends on the resources, if it's good generate content before user needs it, otherwise generate it on request.

Cheers

Thank you Shameless.

We are prepared to spend to do this right, but we need to know how to do this right from the start so that we are not re-doing the whole program down the track or trying to jemmy things into the program at later time. Dedicated servers are a given once the program is put together and tested.

Also a consideration is how to make it bullet proof both from a mega amount of users and from outside hackers. (everyone seems to like a challenge!)

Thank you for your input. Would you have a direction to look in for a good programmer or team? Or do I go looking in the usual places like Elance and such?

All suggestions appreciated.

Biller.