I have tended lately to (very generously) assume it is only because we are not thirteen years old that we don't "get WolframAlpha" and we spend our time randomly trying permutations of subsets of likely words to see if we can get the answer we are hoping for. I suspect there is lots of good data in there, we just don't know how to speak the language to get it.
Unfortunately there is no reference manual with all the rules of acceptable syntax neatly laid out. But that is so half-century-ago thinking.
Knowing a bit of Mathematica syntax, or now the Wolfram language syntax, sometimes means you can guess how to give WolframAlpha a somewhat dumbed down Mathematica expression and get what you are looking for. If you have a little time to learn the basics of that then I highly recommend it. But I caution you that I suspect even knowing Mathematica syntax isn't going to be enough to get the data you want out of WolframAlpha.
I've considered paying for WolframAlpha Pro for a year to see if it will let me overcome the problems I have trying to get answers out of it. Unfortunately I haven't seen a description written for someone from before the car-phone era that actually tells me what the Pro version will do for me that the plain version isn't.
Perhaps the next generation of all this means we will do an interpretive dance in front of the monitor and it understands that means we want table of the inflation adjusted government debt for the last two hundred years.
