A new Google badge system aims to make it easier to find high quality Chrome extensions. The Chrome Web Store will now indicate which extensions and developers meet a “high standard.”

The badges aren’t meant to be a guarantee of a useful, quality extension, but rather an indication that they follow Chrome’s best practices. It doesn’t appear the extensions will bring any advantage such as getting a more prominent place in search results.

The first badge is for individual extensions. It’s called Featured and resembles a prize ribbon. Google says it will manually vet extensions before awarding the badge if it meets two criteria:

• Following Google’s “best practices guidelines” which include working intuitively, minimizing resource use, using the latest APIs and respecting user privacy.
• Having a clear and helpful listing, including a detailed description and images.

The second badge is for publishers and is awarded where the publisher has verified their identity with Google and consistently complied with its policies.

Google hasn’t made clear if the long-term goal is for the badges to indicate the highest-quality extensions or for having the badge to be seen as the norm, raising questions about those which don’t. The latter approach could be difficult given the sheer logistics of manually reviewing every extension.