Sources say the search engine company may be ready to acquire introware company Meetroduction.

Once Google picked up dodgeball.com, they must have been bitten by the social networking bug. An internetnews.com report claims the Mountain View-based search supremos will disclose their purchase of Meetroduction by the end of the week.

The Meetro software, for Windows platforms, has been described as a proximity-based way of finding like-minded people around you in a given geographic area. Dodgeball.com does something similar, and will connect users to a vast network of like-minded people, provided they live in one of 22 cities in the United States.

For Meetro users, the software adds buddy-locating to an IM client; support for AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ is included, with MSN Messenger and Jabber support forthcoming. That might be a popular concept for technophiles and the more socially courageous people out there, but for most people the anonymity of instant messaging is a welcome feature.

So why Meetroduction? For that matter, why Dodgeball? The nature of both products seems to indicate an extension of Google’s local search capabilities. Local search offers the most important market for search engine growth according to speakers at the Search Engine Strategies 2005 conference in San Jose.

Google’s pickup of Meetroduction may be a harbinger of a corporate focus on local search. The company does have the brand recognition and a significant trust factor that could help it drive adoption of local buddy services.

David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.