With the increasing number of services in the internet, companies’ intranets, and home networks: service discovery becomes an integral part of modern networked system. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of major solutions for service discovery. We cover techniques and features used in existing systems. Although a few survey articles have been published on this object, our contribution focuses on comparing and analyzing surveyed solutions according eight prime criteria, which we have defined before. This comparison will be helpful to determine limits of existing discovery protocols and identify future research opportunities in service discovery.