Abstract
COTS-based development is a component reuse approach promising to reduce costs and risks, and ensure higher quality. Searching COTS components to identify potential ones for a later reuse is a critical activity, having to cope with some challenging marketplace characteristics related to its widespread, evolvable and growing nature. In this paper, we present an overview of software component search approaches through the works classifying them. We find that most of them assume an in-house reuse and don't take into account the availability of the net sources of software components. We note also absence of other aspects as classification criteria. We then propose our classification of software components search approaches. Finally, we study the existing COTS components search approaches according to aspects of the proposed classification and the factors influencing the search of such components.