Moving on to writing my own binary search seemed like it made sense after spending time with sorting algorithms, but it turned out to be tougher than I expected. The essential concept of how binary search works, thanks to this video made plenty of sense; the difficulty was to not just locate a given item in a sorted list, but to actually return its original location.
The difficulty started with the fact that I initially designed my algorithm in a way where it took ever smaller slices of the given array, bounded by either the first item and the midpoint item, or the midpoint item and the last item, in the last iteration of the slice. This meant that finding the item was easy, but the only location for it would be its location in the final slice, not the original array. That made my whole algorithm pretty pointless, in my mind. So I redesigned it to keep count of how many items before and after the current slice I had chopped off. And after many tweaks, that worked out.