Evander Holyfield is one of the greatest boxers of the 1990's. Unlike many boxers of that time, Holyfield wasn't a flashy fighter. However, he does boast an impressive roster of boxers he defeated: Riddick Bowe, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Michael Moorer, John Ruiz, and Mike Tyson. The idea of being ranked based upon the quality of the boxers defeated is very similar to how Google ranks websites with the PageRank algorithm. PageRank ranks a website by the sites that link to it. An incoming link from a more prominent website carries more weight than a link from an obscure website. The parallel to boxing is clear, defeating a higher ranked boxer carries more weight than defeating a lower ranked boxer.

As a collaboration with Dr. Tien Chih, we decided to modify PageRank for boxing and apply it to all world title fight boxers for the five major leagues (IBO, IBF, WBA, WBC, WBO) using the world title fights themselves as the "links" for the algorithm. We scraped BoxRec.com for world title fights using Scrapy, cleaned the data, and applied our algorithm to produce a ranking.