You are looking at the HTML representation of the XML format.
HTML is good for debugging, but is unsuitable for application use.
Specify the format parameter to change the output format.
To see the non HTML representation of the XML format, set format=xml.
See the complete documentation, or API help for more information.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api>
  <query>
    <search>
      <p ns="0" title="Create Your First Article" snippet="...r side: &amp;quot;[[ ]]&amp;quot;. If another article has a word or phrase that has the same &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; as your new article, but not expressed in the same words as the title, you &#10;" size="7993" wordcount="1299" timestamp="2014-12-11T15:18:59Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>