Scroll down on the Search Settings page until you see the "Where results open" header and then click the box for "Open each selected result in a new browser window." (Never mind that it says new "window." This setting will open results in a new tab. The top result was a Google support page, which had a link to Search Settings in its first paragraph. For this second account, I could not find a route to the Search Settings page, so I simply did a search on Google for Search settings. I did with my primary Google account that has Google+ profile, but not on my second, sans-Google+ Google account. (You might not see this Search Settings link at the bottom of the Accounts page. Scroll to the bottom of the Accounts page and click the "Visit the Search settings page" link. Once signed into Google, click your mug in the upper right corner and in the resulting pop-up window, click Account.
This new tab page shows Google search box, links for. To do so, you will need to find Google's Search Settings page. When you open the browser or open a new tab, by default it will show a page with the title as New Tab. Instead, tell Google to open results in a new tab by default.
Sure, you can right-click on a link from Google's search results page to open it in a new tab, but that quickly grows tiresome. You can close the tabs that don't amount to much, keeping open the tabs that may aid your research. A better way to search is to open results in new tabs. It's frustrating to locate later a previous result, clicking backward through various pages to locate it. If you conduct research online, you likely run into the problem of burying search results under a trail of links.