TheEspion

Yes!

The entire anonymous IP infrastructure is indeed built-in. Yes, performance is lower than non-JS-enabled scraping. To counter this we offer a variety of options to turn on/off performance trade-offs. They can be set per job and per page.

That's a feature we never thought of. I can't promise it will be available at release time, but quite possibly later next year.

We approach this the same way e-commerce or gaming companies approach fraud: we'll actively monitor the infrastructure and set up safeguards to prevent spam and other illegitimate activities.

Very interesting question. HTML5 audio and video are definitely a possibility, if there's a strong use case. If you have a specific idea, I'd be interested to hear it.

I don't expect Flash or Java support. Flash and Java apps that load their data from standard HTTP resources can be scraped regardless of support, the others need reverse engineering anyway and wouldn't fit with HTML scraping.

You gain access to the page's own DOM and JavaScript, which lets you call the site's functions to fetch data if it helps you. You can also code your scraper with the same techniques you use when building a page: jQuery, CSS selectors, etc - basically all the good interfaces that have been developed over the past 20 years are available to your scraping code.

Actually no, and I don't think our location would protect us from legal liability. Our servers are outside Mauritius, hosting locally would be very expensive and induce latency.

It's more complex than that. Whether the site's TOS are enforceable is a matter of jurisdiction and may depend on the intent of the web scraper.

Ryanair for example has lost several cases where they tried to forbid scraping their website on the groups that data scraping promoted free competition and served consumers in general. See the latest decision here: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ryanair-suffers-setback-ge....

Espion is similar to PhantomJS in that they're both headless browsers that you can inject JavaScript into.

Espion comes with a lot more. First there is the infrastructure: processing power, storage, connectivity and IP addresses that you don't have to provision, set up or manage. Second, Espion includes the features that surround extracting data from a site such as job scheduling, data quality monitoring, online debugging and problem resolution and data delivery.

PhantomJS is perfectly viable, but if you need the features I highlighted and use it, you'll have to build a lot yourself to get the job done.

CAPTCHAs and IP blacklistings are things you encounter routinely in perfectly legitimate and legal web scraping projects. A typical example are businesses that want to monitor their competitors' prices or the second hand market for their products.

We have plans to actively prevent the use of our platform for illegitimate purposes (fraud, spam, etc.).

Thanks, we'll definitely do that.

The packages are for a set number of pages, with no timeframe. I don't have prices yet for a load in the millions of pages per hour. What kind of system do you feed data into?

We target businesses that want to fulfil their web data extraction needs in-house rather than hiring a third-party provider – which we originally are. Espion was built for our own needs at first and we’re still in the customer discovery phase. I expect we’ll find many use cases in the coming months.