Improved search filters

How about check boxes for all the subcategories when searching for titles ? For example, looking for "high school" and "romance" will return houndreds of titles, but there's no way of filtering out any category?

For me that would be sci-fi, fantasy, magic, etc anti-sol stuff. Or is there a way but I just don't know how to use it properly ?

Edited on 07/30/2010 10:35 AM.

YEH .. the search filters are a bit weak. But they do nest two levels deep... Do a search on SCI-FI and then do a 2nd search on HIGH SCHOOL and you will get all {sci-fi / high school} themed anime series.

I like the advanced search features of MangaFox with its [CLICK BOX] selection menu.

The mangafox [CLICK BOX] options toggle between an {include}, {exclude} and {neutral} selection.

Edited on 07/30/2010 02:06 PM.

I don't think there's any maximum level of the "AND" operator... for an example see http://anime.mikomi.org/by-key/Romance/High+School/Modern/Depression/Dating+Sim+Spinoff.

What ANN does not support is a "NOT" operator, i. e. excluding of any kind. This may be a problem in so far as many keywords tend to describe the exception of the rule (such as "Weird" or "Perverted") when the rule itself has no keyword "Normal". Therefore it may be difficult to exactly describe specific type of anime at ANN. This is one reason why I tend to add links to "similar" anime in most every review - to allow readers to "surf the semantic cloud of anime".

Other anime sites (e. g. ANN) support more powerful operations such as "start from anime X, then sort all other anime by the number of keywords they have in common with anime X". While CAR doesn't have a simple GUI for this it may at least give a hint how to emulate it here: Get your reference anime of choice, sort the keywords by (your subjective) relevance, and then use the "By Category" path to combine by "AND" these keywords one by one, shrinking down the set of anime towards a subset of "similar" anime to X. (The example above was meant to find similar animes to Kanon (2006) and ended up with Kanon, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo (which I apparently ought to inspect a bit closer now), and School Days (TV).