imacmacospreferences
Recently I noticed that on my iMac, running El Capitan, the Open Recent menu has stopped getting updated, both in the Apple menus, and for apps, and both for the Open Recent menu item, and the list that pops up from the Dock.
I checked in System Preferences | General | Recent Items, and it is saying None. I have tried a number of times to reset it to 20, but it shows up as None when I get back in to System Preferences.
I hope someone can help me sort this problem out.
At least on my machine, this is what I'm seeing:
Apple -> Recent Items, but Word and Excel do not. Which seems crazy, but that's what's happening on my machine.My own experience (on 10.9) is that the service uses the default search engine selected for the default browser, so right now my own "Search with…" says "Search DuckDuckGo for…" and will open in Firefox.
This doesn't answer your other questions, but it may mean you don't need to bother. I hope it helps. I've an old system running 10.6 so I'll give that a look when I get a chance and see if the same can be done there.
Best Answer
For me, this partially fixed things:
In my case this fixed the recent items lists under the File menu in each app and the Apple menu. But the context menus on Dock icons still do not update.