There's a nice blog post over at Google Blogoscoped with responses to the question: “What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?”

One of the big take-aways here is that information overload is often self-induced, at least when it comes to RSS and social networks. That said, managing email inbox load is a perpetual challenge for many, and the rise of RSS and social networks is partially due to the desire to keep in touch, but not via emai.

Some quick additional ideas:

Thumbstrips appends a vertical bar to the bottom of your browser with thumbnails of the pages you've recently visited. Very handy for deep research browsing sessions.

Search Canyon Firefox ExtensionSearch Canyon augments google, msn, and yahoo search results with icons which provide a "more like this" function inline. Very handy. Stay tuned, we'll dig into the algorithm.

Flare is a ActionScript port of the prefuse graphics library. Seriously sexy visualizations in Flash/Flex with a minimum of effort.

SearchCubeSearchCube isn't exactly useful, but it's pretty darn cool.

It credits thumbshot but seems to mix web page thumbnails and key images.

The brain is a pretty unique bit of software. You can use it to do bookmarks, mind mapping, browse your files, or even build maps of websites.

Nifty experience, but not rich enough for serious use.

Very cool interaction... SearchMe uses a Flash interface to provide rich visual previews of the results in a sliding animation style called coverflow, and made popular by the iPhone.

A blog post by Arrington over at TechCrunch calls attention to the usefulness of Google's freshness filter for restricting results to recent, or older, content.

Filtering Google Results by Freshness

One of the commenters offers a 24 hours filtered google search provider for installation into your browser search box.

Flock is a Firefox derived browser with a nice RSS Reader built in as well as lots of good web 2.0 site integration including Flickr, delicious, etc.