A system and associated method for advanced searching of a service registry for a service description that is most closely matches a service name provided by a user. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) service registry system receives the service name and searches the service registry for the service description that is an exact match of the service name. Upon determining that the exact match does not exist in the service registry, the SOA service registry system generates an alternative service name list by use of a name parser, a dictionary, and a name composer of the SOA service registry system and calculates respective ranks of alternative service names. The service registry is searched pursuant to respective ranks of the alternative service names and the SOA service registry system returns the service description that is searched by a highest ranked alternative service name from the ranked alternative service name list.