Hey Jeremy, cool idea. I searched and that was the only snippet on Drupal.org that I could turn up, too. This might make for an interesting contributed module for whoever turns it out. That snippet is lacking at the very least a check_plain() around the title of the link... it's potentially vulnerable to an XSS attack as is. It also depends on the statistics module...

I think for what you're looking to accomplish, you'll need to track node views in some other table... You'll need a way to store the actual nid so you can more easily query the DB for product data and image paths. I'm not sure how making this into a Views filter would work, but I think you're right in assuming that's the way to go.