Comment by ribit

One also needs to look at the context of these quotes. For example, for the binary search they change the array layout to improve cache locality. This is not really helpful if you have to work with sorted arrays (as many binary search algorithms do). If instead you have the freedom to optimize the data structure itself (and you do the search often enough to amortize the construction), you might as well build some variant of a B-tree which is going to be much faster than binary search anyway.