According to some embodiments, a method and system provides receiving a request to execute a query for a business object (BO) instance for an application, the request including selection criteria; determining whether to execute the query by the application or a separate search engine, the determining based on metadata associated with the BO instance; sending the selection criteria to the search engine to execute the query in response to the determination that the query is to be executed by the search engine; receiving a result of the query execution from the search engine; and providing an output of the query result.