First occurrence in a binary search

Question

I'm tinkering with some code and I realized something I never knew. A normal binary search will return a random index in a data set for a key that occurs more than once. How can I modify this code below to return the first occurrence? Is this something people do?

//ripped from the JDK
public static int binarySearchValue(InvertedContainer.InvertedIndex[] a, long key) {
    return bSearchVal(a, 0, a.length, key);
}

private static int bSearchVal(InvertedContainer.InvertedIndex[] a, int fromIndex,
                                 int toIndex, long key) {
    int low = fromIndex;
    int high = toIndex - 1;

    while (low <= high) {
        int mid = (low + high) >>> 1;
        long midVal = a[mid].val;

        if (midVal < key)
            low = mid + 1;
        else if (midVal > key)
            high = mid - 1;
        else
            return mid; // key found
    }
    return (low); // key not found. return insertion point
}

Answer 1

An addition to Jon Skeets post:

The potential faster implementation is actually not hard to implement and adds only 2 lines of code, here is how I'd do it:

    if (midVal < key)
        low = mid + 1;
    else if (midVal > key)
        high = mid - 1;
    else if (low != mid) //Equal but range is not fully scanned
        high = mid; //Set upper bound to current number and rescan
    else //Equal and full range is scanned
        return mid;