I AM at the age when many of my friends are pregnant. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what pregnancy entails: the cravings for pickles and chocolate, the abstaining from wine and coffee, the nausea and stretch marks, the aloof but well-meaning husband.

But I recently studied anonymous, aggregate Google search data from 20 countries to find out what was really going on. It turns out that much of what I thought about pregnancy was wrong, and that pregnancy plays out very differently around the world.

Start with questions about what pregnant women can do safely. The top questions in the United States: Can pregnant women “eat shrimp,” “drink wine,” “drink coffee” or “take Tylenol”?

But other countries don’t look much like the United States or one another. Whether pregnant women can “drink wine” is not among the top 10 questions in Canada, Australia or Britain. Australia’s concerns are mostly related to eating dairy products while pregnant, particularly cream cheese. In Nigeria, where 30 percent of the population uses the Internet, the top question is whether pregnant women can drink cold water.