clearing recent history in finder

I am having a hard time figureing out how to clear recently viewed items in my finders history. I have cleared recent files and cleared my cache but they still show up in the folder labled today as well as past week. Does anyone have any suggestions or can this even be done. I am able to remove the items by sending them to trash but I do not want to delete these items as some are applications and some important documents. Any help is appreciated.

There is a menu item to Clear History. I'm not at my Mac to find it now.

But, you can't set it to not save History. The minimum is one day.

Edit: Disregard. I was thinking about Safari.

but they still show up in the folder labled today as well as past week.

Click to expand...

This folder?


If that is the folder, no you cannot get rid of the files in there.
This is because it is a smart folder, It constantly collects all the files that have the modified Today date, last week .etc info property
The Smart Mac: Smart Folders in OS X

The best you can do is go into Finder>Preferences>Sidebar and tell it not to list those folders. Or if you are trying to make something not show up on that list, you can move them to a separate folder or keep theme where they are, then go into system preferences>spotlight>privacy and add whatever folders you want to the list and spotlight won't add those items to the smart folders.

So if I added the movies folder to the spotlight privacy list, it wont bring anything in that folder up when I search in spotlight, or in the Today, Yesterday, last week folders.

Either remove or use spotlight privacy, your only options.

Won't Onyx do this??

Ok, now that I've read the question more carefully...
Those items in the Sidebar aren't actually folders. They are for searching. The files that appear in them still reside in their original spots.
But, yeah, you can turn them off (uncheck) in Finder Preferences.