All search engines deal with compressed integers, all compressors do, and most people doing bit-manipulation. Golomb, gamma, elias, rice coding, they all need this. Heck, even the Intel engineers chose to optimize this function by including the BSR instruction in the 386 architecture.  This is a basic building block.

Don't underestimate the bit, it is coming back with a vengeance. Bit-coding is everywhere now, because of the memory hierarchy.  No haskeller should be left behind.