OsCommerce Advanced Search Drill Down

[chopperwalker]

I am finishing up an e-commerce site for my company. There is an advanced search feature in which I have included additional fields specific to the type of product. Basically, you can define (from select menus) the Manufacturer, the Category, the Color, the Style, Price range, and Width range and it will spit out the products that are pertinent to these results. Standard and working.
My goal is to have these menus included on the search results page. The options in the menus on results page should then be limited to the available options in the results returned. So, if you pick a manufacturer (submits query) the remaining menus will limit their options to product's attributes that are available from that Manufacturer. If there are 10 total colors in the system, and Manufacturer A only has 5 of those colors then only those 5 colors will be available.
I tried $_GETing the variables and doing a new query for each menu. It wasn't clean and I would like to avoid more queries since there will eventually be 30,000+ products. I am thinking about trying to run a unique() on each needed field of the returned results. Maybe there is a better approach, any ideas?

If I can get this running right and cleaned up I am going to submit it as an OsCommerce Contribute. I am running OsC 2 Milestone 2. I have moded the Products table to include the three extra fields mentioned above (color, style and width).

Thank you for your input