I'm building an application that detects plagiarized answers on Stack Overflow, so I need to retrieve the content of answers programatically.

I know I can do this using the [Stack Exchange API][api], but the [API uses rate-limiting/throttling][throttle] to prevent abuse.

I was considering just making normal HTTP page requests and scraping those rather than going through the API, but I was wondering if page requests are also rate-limited? For example, if I make 5 page requests a second for 30 seconds, **would my IP address start to get significantly rate-limited?** Is it possible that my IP address would even incur a permanent ban?

I found the following comment by [Martin Smith][martin] mentioning page request rate-limiting on [The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide][guide],

> There's also a limit for page requests per IP address per time period which I think must have recently been tightened (saw it twice yesterday) but I don't know what the exact limit is.

but other than that I didn't find anything definitive and authoritative about this. Are the exact details intentionally kept a secret to make it harder for malicious entities to DDoS Stack Exchange?

[guide]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899/the-complete-rate-limiting-guide#comment733753_164900
[martin]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/145673/martin-smith
[throttle]: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/throttle
[api]: https://api.stackexchange.com/