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="Task Identification Using Search Engine Query Logs" snippet="...&amp;gt; claimed that 75% of submitted queries involve some form of multitasking, &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; users tend to solve several tasks at once by interleaving their queries.&#10;...essarily relies on past experience and context to identify the most likely &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; of a sentence. For the computer, it needs to perform much like a human woul&#10;" size="31624" wordcount="4789" timestamp="2014-01-23T13:57:15Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>