How Doozer finds new businesses to build — the Grand Opening Finder, Cloud Radar, and the hybrid Google Places discovery engine.
Prospector is how the fleet grows on purpose instead of at random: it discovers real businesses worth building and feeds them into site creation and Clouds.
Single-shot discovery → filter → review → one-click create. A sweep resolves a center (ZIP or city/state via prDiscoveryResolveCenter() in includes/prospector-discovery-engine.php), queries Google Places, and keeps only fresh openings (OPERATIONAL + very few reviews + not already known). Results land in pr_discoveries / pr_discovery_sweeps with per-call cost recorded. Niche-optional: pick "Any niche" for a regional pass or one of 39+ types.
OLD Nearby Search for legacy types + Places API (New) searchNearby for newer types and the any-niche path, normalized to one response shape. Per-call cost is tracked (see API cost discipline is not it — cost discipline is an operator rule: check whether each pull costs, reuse cache, pull only the unavoidable remainder). Cross-root ecosystem awareness reuses an existing businesses row when a place is already known (skips paid detail + research, saving ~$0.50/business), with a same-root duplicate guard.
pr_discovery_schedules + a traffic-driven runner (rate-limited via platform_settings) run sweeps automatically. Cloud/Idea Radar extends this to demand: signals like Google Search Console impressions reveal what people are already looking for, so Doozer can build the Cloud or vertical the market is asking for. Discovery → build → auto-draft marketing post closes the loop: a new site can announce itself.
Prospector is the intake valve of the flywheel.