Wolfram Alpha was often hyped as the latest and greatest search engine.

I wouldn't call it so. It's just a very minimalistic search frontend to a nice database with lots of numerical facts.

Yes, it can give you the height of the eiffel tower (because that's a fact in its databases). It can even compute for you what Pi times the height of the eiffel tower is. But that is about as far as you can go in combining. In my tests, I wasn't able to compare the temperature in Munich with the temperature in Berlin (both of which WA will visualize you with a pretty graph, so these are facts in WA) - their query parser just doesn't get my question.

The funniest reply so far however was to the question:

How many cars in Germany?

No

Seriously, I doubt that there are no cars in Germany.

At least it also offers an explanation why it comes to this conclusion:

Cars is a town in south-western France (which as you might guess currently is not a part of Germany. :-) ) - so for WA, there are at least cars somewhere in Europe, but not in Germany!