[tb99]

I think this is a nice approach. You may even be able to take it further; if you're training end to end based on users' queries, you can probably have the query and image representations in the same space and use a simple similarity measure in place of the tiny neural net (something like OpenAI's CLIP model).

The tricky part will be scaling it -- not just for speed, but keeping the index size down. Also, you'll need to already have some version of image search to collect the training data.