In the last couple of months I’ve been working on some Web Service discovery techniques. There are a couple of them but I would like to share the most recent ones (the one that makes most sense to me today). You can check Massive Enumeration Toolset (MET) if you need tools to automate the discovery process.

Web Services are usually described with WSDL (Web Service Description Language) files. This means that the easiest way to find services is to search for these files. Using Google to do the following queries should result in a fair amount of WSD documents: wsdl filetype:wsdl, inurl:asmx?wsdl, inurl:php?wsdl. Remember to disable Google’s content filtering facility because this will improve your search results.

Of course, there are many other techniques you can employ. It is worth researching on UDDI if you really want to get into this kind of stuff. The last time I queried Google using the techniques mentioned above, I discovered 1198 Web Services some of which worth checking out.