How to make Spotlight promote results to the top?
I ran into the same problem.  What worked for me was to use command-space to begin the spotlight search, type in the characters to search for, then clicking on the app I want to be the first in the list.  For example, if I type just a "t", the textEdit app was the first choice, but I wanted the terminal app to be first.  After clicking on the terminal app in the list, the next time I typed just "t", the terminal app came up first!