From my notes;
"The region of wavenumbers below 1500 cm-1 tends to correspond to the vibration and rotation of the entire molecule and hence is unique to each molecule. This region is known as the ‘fingerprint region’, and is useful for identifying compounds by comparing against other spectra."
The reason why the rest of the spectra isn't as useful is because they tend to only correspond to vibration of individual bonds, such as OH bonds etc. Many molecules have these so it doesn't do particularly much in terms of identifying the entire molecule, and problems especially come up when you get to isomers and such.
For wavenumber, also in my notes is "Wavenumber is the reciprocal of the wavelength corresponding to a particular peak. As such, increasing wavenumber corresponds to increasing frequency and decreasing wavelength." As for the others, someone who does physics answer this as it's definitely not my strong point.
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