On the dawn of service-oriented computing, finding relevant.Web services was mainly done by scanning through services registries (i.e. UDDI Business Registries or UBRs). Automated Web service search engines were not necessary when Web services were counted by the hundreds. However, the number of service registries is gradually increasing and Web service access points (i.e. WSDLs) are no longer a scarce resource as there are thousands of Web services disseminated throughout the Web. Our experiments show building a crawler and a centralized repository for Web services is inevitable. In this work, .we have used our .Web Service Crawler Engine (WSCE), a crawler that is capable of capturing service information from various accessible resources over the Web, to help us in conducting our investigation of Web services on the Web. In our study, we investigated the distribution of certain elements and characteristics of the available Web services on the Web. Distribution based on valid WSDL interfaces, file sizes, HTTP status, and technology trends are found. Results provide an overall view on the current status of Web services. An intriguing result is that fact those search engines have become a new major source for searching for Web services and that they constitute 72% of Web services available on the Web. Such service statistics may likely drive search engines to examine the potential of interoperability with service registries or apply features that can turn them into effective tools used for discovering services on the Web. Although UDDI and search engines provide two distinctive