How to make Spotlight promote results to the top? I recently updated my my Mac from a Macbook Pro 2013 Retina to a Macbook Pro 2017. In the process, I moved from Sierra to High Sierra OS.

The most annoying thing about this transition has been the loss of a quick navigation to the applications folder. I used to be able to bring it up with Cmd + space for spotlight, and type "App" and the Applications folder was the first result.

Now, it's a crap shoot if the folder will be in the results for "App" at all. To get it to reliably be the top result, I have to type all the way out to "Application" or even "Applications". (The horror!)

How can I change this behavior to have what I want at the top of the list? Is there a specific setting change I can make to Spotlight? Or is it just a matter of patient retraining?

I saw this question Spotlight search results priority from 2015 and OS X 10.9 that suggests modifying the filters and also states that there are no options provided for changing the priority. Is that still the case?
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!