This thing was making me crazy lately. Cleaning up cookies as some suggest was not an option as I’m always logged in into my Gmail account. Indeed, I could have switched to Incognito mode to have keyboard shortcuts at my fingertips but for God’s sake who would be content with such UX?
So I spent half an hour and finally found that Lou Kosak said in the Google product forums:
Just found a (the?) fix. Turns out tab + arrow keys + enter navigation of search results only works if Google Instant is turned on (see https://superuser.com/a/554324).
To summarize the superuser answer:
- go to google.com when logged in
- click Settings in the bottom right
- click “Search Settings”
- update your “Google Instant Predictions” setting to “Only when my computer is fast enough” or “Always show instant results”.
Update 2017-07-31: Google has dropped Instant search. See: http://searchengineland.com/google-dropped-google-instant-search-279674. This means that this solution does not work anymore.