Malware Warning: There are countless places where you can download programs. A surprising number foist malicious software on the unsuspecting. It's not easy to tell evil sites from legitimate ones. Experience, common sense and research can help you avoid them.

Booby Traps: When you search for software you'll often see "sponsored links" (text ads) as well as actual search results. You don't have any way to tell the adds that link to bad sites from the good ones unless you use something like SiteAdvisor (see below). The custom search engines on this page search only at sites that are generally safe, but don't trust text ads that appear in their results either.

McAfee's SiteAdvisor can help: Their browser add-on [IE or Firefox] ties in to special "spiders" that patrol the Web, download and test files, and report the evil ones. [free]