---
title: "Which came first, Google or pizza?"
description: "Google vs pizza: pizza came first, by 218 years — 1780 against 1998. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/google-vs-pizza/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Google or pizza?

**Which came first, Google or pizza?: pizza**

1780 — 218 years before Google

pizza came first, by 218 years. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

## Side by side

|  | Google | pizza |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1998 | 1780 |
| Date | 1998-09-04 | — |
| Category | technology | food |
| What happened | Google Inc. was incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park. | Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. |

## Google

The date used here is the incorporation, 4 September 1998. Two others compete: the research project called BackRub began at Stanford in 1996, and the google.com domain was registered on 15 September 1997. Google itself has celebrated its birthday on four different September dates over the years, which is a fair indication that no single one is correct. It is younger than Amazon, eBay and Netflix.

## pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Google or pizza?

pizza, by 218 years — 1780 against 1998.

### When did Google start?

1998. Google Inc. was incorporated in a garage in Menlo Park.

### When did pizza start?

1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

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## Sources

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)