Is There Such A Thing As A Trusted Web Sites List?

Gnomie Andrew Norman writes:

Hi Chris,

I use both Windows and Linux and something occurred to me. I would really like to find a good, reliable place that lists spyware-free Web sites.

This would be great for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’d like to have confidence that what I’m downloading won’t have malware. Second, it could lead me to check out great Web sites that I’d have otherwise never heard of. I would personally benefit a lot from this and I’m pretty sure other people would too.

There are some Web sites that I trust to be without spyware implicitly, like Microsoft.com, Adobe.com, and reliable companies like that, but what about Web sites like CNET? I mean, it looks reliable, and it says it’s spyware free, but how confident can I be of that? I personally know that CNET is reliable because I’ve done a wee bit of research on it, but I don’t have the time to do that for every Web site I come across.

I’d love to Google this and find such a list, but that would be kind of self-defeating since I have absolutely no idea whether or not such a list is reliable.

So my question for you is this: Do you know of such a site and could you tell me where it is?