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As they say in their little introductory tour, it's a computational engine, not a regular search engine. If the query doesn't involve a computation of some sort or looking up a numerical answer of some sort, you're out of luck.

And, unfortunately, not every question having a numerical answer can be answered with Wolfram Alpha. Not even close. Otherwise, what would the world's mathematicians do all day? ;-)

But apart from that, WA can't answer anywhere close to all the mundane numerical questions one might ask. There are just too many of them, and too many of them are of no interest to anyone and never would be.

But there is a remedy. If you need the answer to some question and think others might also be interested, WA is definitely open to user suggestions.

It happened to me. A couple of years ago, I was trying to no avail to find total border lengths and shared border lengths around and between various countries. So I submitted it to WA but got no response. I would check in every once in a while to see if they had gotten around to adding it. Nothing. Yeah, they must've had a good laugh at me.

Now today I check and, WOW, it's all there... shared border lengths, total border lengths, even the lengths of coastlines around islands and such, which I threw in at the last minute to keep them on their toes.

So, on the one hand WA has been a little bit of a disappointment, because everything isn't there. But on the other, try to imagine writing the program yourself. OMG, it'd be a massive undertaking and would take me about a billion years. So... Good job, Wolfram Alpha!