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="ETL scenario language" snippet="* Parser always checks one error at the time, &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; if there are multiple errors it generates exception for the first found err&#10;" size="25693" wordcount="3738" timestamp="2014-08-14T03:59:43Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>