While looking at existing tests in this area, I came across SpatialIndexingTest#testNonGeoDistanceSort. AFAICT, this tests is not making any assertions, so at best it is verifying that no exception is thrown. It also uses a class - NonGeoPOI which does afaict is not using geospatial indexing (it contains a longitude/latitude field though). I am not quite sure about the intention of this test and the expectation of the code behaviour. Should this throw an exception?