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="Add a Top X Sales by State pie chart to your Dashboard" snippet="...r online business. Now you can start those targeted Google Ads you&#039;ve been &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; to do all summer long.&#10;" size="3666" wordcount="638" timestamp="2013-08-15T11:01:40Z" />
      <p ns="0" title="Postal Code Filter Pattern Matching" snippet="code matching, but is mentioned here because the &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; differs from the simple&#10;....  Then we included a second grouping.  The grouping begins with a hyphen, &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; we expect the 5 digit zip code to have a hyphen before the plus 4.  Then we&#10;" size="7878" wordcount="1245" timestamp="2009-07-12T17:56:29Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>