Bindi Irwin, daughter of late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, victim of Web death hoax

At the curious confluence of a very minor State Department scandal, promotions for a new Lifetime movie and old press clippings about the late Crocodile Hunter, the Internet briefly killed Bindi Irwin.

Internet search engines conspired Friday to briefly, yet profoundly, mislead Web watchers that the scion of the late Steve Irwin had, like her father, met an untimely death.

Tweets abounded on the 14-year-old’s demise after it appeared the phrase, “Steve Irwin daughter dies,” was, in fact, trending on the Web.

It was all, as Social News Daily reported, the product of an unfortunate and so-called “trend hiccup.”

Apparently, Bindi Irwin has been recently highlighted in the media on myriad fronts, and it's this recent notoriety which is at least partly to blame for Friday's hoax-like reports of her death.

Not only does she appears in a new Lifetime movie, “Return to Nim’s Island,” promotions for which season the Web, but was also the subject of a well-reported article titled, “Bindi Irwin is all Grown Up,” based on recent photographs of a now-adolescent girl who was, until this week, perhaps best remembered for bravely speaking about her father’s 2006 death.

In January, she was also reportedly mired in a fiasco concerning a 1,000-word essay she wrote for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department.  As various accounts have it, Bindi Irwin wrote the essay, focusing on conservation, but eventually prohibited the department’s mandarins from actually publishing it after she saw how heavily edited the final product turned out to be.

The incident was – at the time – rather well-reported, according to Social News Daily, and combined this week with Internet searches concerning “Return to Nim’s Island,” the all-grown-up Bindi Irwin story, and old press accounts of her father's death to produce the aforementioned “hiccup.”