Indeed. It is extremely annoying to have my arrow keys hijacked for no apparent reason. I know how to scroll a page and click on links, thank you very much. I tend to look through a page before scrolling, and use the arrows to scroll down and reveal more stuff.

Really? I find being able to go through the results using the arrows very useful. When I'm doing a Google search, I want to get to a web site, optimally without using the mouse. Having this feature routinely saves me from having to use the mouse, which is particularly nice on a laptop.

Having the arrow keys go directly to search results is very useful especially because it takes three or four times less presses to navigate that way than using tab. Besides, if I want to scroll, I can always use the space bar--it's faster anyhow.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

(I know me-too comments are generally frowned on, and quite right too, but we have a senior Googler reading this thread and comment scores are invisible now...)

Better still, my browser has that feature (ctrl+arrows to navigate links instead of scrolling). This feature of Google's brings zero benefit to me.