Recreating Extenal Item Picker for Internal Lists

SharePoint Online E3 License.

SharePoint 2013 comes with a number of BCS Web Parts, one of which is a Filter WebPart. This can be connected to other BDC web parts on a page, or lists with an external column to effectively filter other web parts. Whst I like about this is the fact that you have a "picker" facility, which allows you to search the available External content types

I'd like to know if I can achieve something similar but with internal data. I'm aware I can add a normal list to a page and then feed the filter columns to other web parts but as more data gets added to this filter list, it's space on a homepage will increase, which is not a desireable outcome. To that end, can I use a Picker facility with internal lists, much in the same way as it functions with BDC Web Parts.

Any ideas appreciated.