Service discovery is an essential critical element in large scale, open distributed systems. Its implementation is a key functionality of the distributed underlying infrastructures of both web services frameworks and grid systems where searching and finding services are one of the main tasks. In the framework of sharing grid software resources, different discovery mechanisms have been evaluated. Grid solutions have been considered, together with industry-initiated methods, but the main hurdle for all methods is a lack of automation. In dealing with such WSDL-based services, the paper outlines the different methods in terms of the information model and searching tools. Moreover, to enable automation, it proposes an approach to introducing semantic technologies on the discovery process. Analyzing a web service process and its actors, semantics could be added to the interactions between provider and client or directly to the broker. The former solution moves towards enriching web service description by means of semantic languages. The second requires the modification of the broker responsible for the matching user requirements with the service capabilities offered by introducing new modules.