Search engines on the Web provide a world of information at our fingertips, and the answers to many of our common questions are just one click away. However, for the complex and multifaceted tasks involving a process of knowledge construction, various information seeking models describe an intricate set of cognitive stages (Kuhlthau, 2004; Vakkari, 2001). These stages influence the interplay of users’ feelings, thoughts and actions. Despite the evidence of the models, common search engines, nowadays the prime intermediaries between information and user, still feature a streamlined set of 'ten blue links'. While efficient for lookup tasks, this approach may not be beneficial for supporting sustained information-intensive tasks and knowledge construction. Would there be other approaches to support the complex dynamics of these ventures? Based on previous experiments, this talk discusses how the utility of search functionality during different stages of complex tasks is essentially dynamic. This provides opportunities for designing 'stage-aware' search systems, which may evolve along with a user's information journey.