[suprgeek]

What good alternatives would people suggest? What should be the "goto" site we could suggest to a novice for finding a clean copy of almost any software...any suggestions? (Assuming that an expert user would straight to the source website)

[Deestan]

Any good "goto" site won't stay that way for long, because it will automatically have strong incentives to try tons of stupid crap like this.

But you can use these sites for software lookup. Then you check the listed developer name, Bing your way onto their website, and look for a download link.

[monochromatic]

Bing? What happened, did some malware install a Bing toolbar on your computer or something? :)

[narcissus]

Not a site for grabbing any software, but for most of the software I (or, for example, my mother in law) would use (outside of dev tools), I go to ninite.com, tick the boxes of what I want and get what is essentially a single installer for everything.

That's my current 'goto' site, at least.

[nicpottier]

This is one reason app stores will continue to gain traction. It's a single place you can go and know you are getting the developer approved version, all with the addition of easy updates.

[blub]

The software producer's website is the only safe place.

[waitwhat]

Regular users have no way to reliably identify the software producer's website. Advising them to "just google it" is likely to end up with them clicking a scammy AdWords link where paying $40 to download some freeware counts as getting off lightly.

[gus_massa]

If you download something from the programmer page it is impossible to be sure that it has no spyware/crazy-toolbars/whatever. Some time ago, if you download it from download.com you know that it was safe.

[suprgeek]

True but when you want to suggest to a novice "Why don't you use "X" " It is unrealistic to expect them to search for X in Google, go to the appropriate link of X's creator, figure out the right page to download it from.

Instead - Go to filehippo search for X in the big search bar at top - download first result - is a much easier workflow. (Trust me on this one - I tech support about 6 relatives)

[waitwhat]

filehippo is excellent, and they have a pretty good update checker (although that is obviously not as comprehensive as, say, sumo.)