Today wireless communications are synonym of mobility and resource sharing. These characteristics, proper of spontaneous and ad-hoc networks relies heavily on a general resource discovery process. The discovery process, being an unavoidable procedure, has to be fast and reliable to mitigate the effect of network disruptions. In this article, by means of simulations and a real testbed, our contribution is twofold. First we assess the discovery process focusing on the adaptation of 802.11 timers: MinChannelTime and MaxChannelTime. Then, varying these timers, we propose and evaluate an adaptive discovery strategy from which we obtain notable improvements over a fixed timers strategy.