I love the visualization, which gave me an idea: what if we numbered every "Looking at" step in the visualization? Then it's obvious just how many search steps it takes.
And then maybe even juxtapose that with a linear search example, which also numbers every step. I bet this would make it really click for some people. And for free the user can also play with how a linear search can sometimes be faster when they just want the first element!
As a bonus: allow the user to change the cell count so they can really feel just how each method scales!