I get around such problems by; When I find a link I want to check out, I open it in a new tab/window. Then when I am done, I close it and am back where I started.

This seems to be a recent Google search innovation and I agree that it's not very helpful, and it messes up simply clicking the next thing because it moves the next item down the page. I have been ignoring it, but since you asked, I went looking for a workaround.

I had two theories:

(1) If I stripped off the tracking from the search results links, then Google wouldn't know which one I visited and came back from.

You can see how the tracking works if you right-click a results link and see the URL in the lower left corner changes from a direct links to something that runs through a Google script. This is why I can never right-click > Copy the URL and that totally irritates me.

So I found an add-on to kill two bird with one stone and it seems to be working so far:

Google search link fix: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/

Now... you might be nervous about an add-on that wants to be able to access every page you view; seems like overkill, but I guess it's because there are so many different Google URLs. If you don't like giving an add-on this level of permissions, there may be other ones that work equally well but only on the sites you care about. I stopped shopping, so I don't know if there are!

(2) Plan B would be to simply hide that extra panel any time Google generates it. Google will be none-the-wiser and you won't be bothered by it.

Some add-ons you already use, such as ad-blockers might be able to do this already through their feature to remove annoying bits from pages.

Alternately, this could be done with a custom style rule or perhaps a user script. I might experiment with this later and if I do, I'll update this thread.