A system and associated method for searching a service registry system with a service name. The present invention receives a request to search a service description with the service name. If conventional search does not find a match for the service name in a registry, the present invention parses the service name and generates candidate service names for alternative searches from synonyms stored in a dictionary database. The registry is searched again with generated candidate service names and any service description found to be a match of any candidate service name is returned.