Very good to be reminded of this. The funny thing is that there was a brief time right before deep learning took over computer vision research, but after people realized the implications of big data, where it looked like the future could be really simple nearest neighbor search supported by enormous data sets. For example, the famous "80 million tiny images" paper by Torralba, Fergus, and Freeman from 2008.
PDF:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/publications/80millionI...
Web:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/TinyImages/