The field of Web services is an important paradigm in distributed application development. Currently, many businesses are seeking to convert their applications into web services because of its ability to promote inter-operability among applications. As a number of web services increase, the process of discovering appropriate web services for consumption from user's perspective gains importance. In this paper, we present a study of potential ways of discovering web services and issues related to each of them. In addition, we discuss ontology concepts and related technologies, which incorporate semantic meaning and hence give domain knowledge about a web service to improve the discovery mechanism. The paper also presents an overview of related research work, identifying metrics useful in filtering web service search mechanisms.