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There's no secret what the most-searched-for item on the Internet is: porn.

Whether it's a curious search for the latest Paris Hilton nipple slip or some type of sick and twisted fetish, sex is the undisputed online king. It has the crown and always will.

So what's the most popular search outside of the sex realm? It's a close cousin as a vice, but remains pretty PG.

According to one of the industries leading search engines, Lycos.com, poker was the most searched topic on the Internet. It's the second year in a row the game has earned such honors.

Poker drew more interest than MySpace, YouTube and golf. It even dominated the interest in the volatile Britney Spears.

The interest in poker remains hot, despite a constant forecast that the fad is nearing its end. It all started in 2003 when a Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker won the Main Event of the World Series of Poker. It was his first trip into a live casino, and by the time he walked out of it he was $2.5 million richer.

The success story fueled the poker boom, and it hasn't died down since.

The reason is money. It's impossible to cite an exact figure on the U.S. poker-playing population, but it's been estimated to be between 50 million and 70 million players. This is hardly an arbitrary number.

Some players play very high stakes, but most of them play for a measly $10 or $20 per session.

It takes only a few winning sessions to turn the hobby into a passion, which is justified by the popularity of the game in the Lycos search engines. Poker had a rather turbulent year in 2007 with the U.S. government. In September 2006, Congress passed a bill that blocked banks from transferring money to online poker sites. The legislation crippled the online industry as many of the game's most popular sites discontinued service to U.S.-based customers.

This didn't keep some companies from continuing on with a "business as usual" approach, in which alternative methods were invented to transfer funds into online poker accounts.

Poker wasn't the only surprise of the year-end findings of Lycos.

On the lighter side in the subcategories, the most-searched-for male of 2007 was Clay Aiken. Britney Spears earned top billing among women. "Dancing with the Stars" was the hottest show on television, and Green Day drew the most interest in the music category.

And proof that the decline of Western civilization is in progress:

Tennis star Anna Kournikova earned top billing as the most-searched-for sports figure of 2007. It matters little that she retired from the game in 2004 and never won a major tournament.

— 210SA is an urban-youth magazine produced by Hearst in San Antonio, Texas.