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="Using OpenID" snippet="...be &amp;quot;president_barack_obama@whitehouse.gov&amp;quot; from OpenID provider X doesn&#039;t &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;mean&lt;/span&gt; he/she actually owns that email, but you can uniquely identify them as that&#10;...ether there&#039;s an &amp;quot;openid.mode&amp;quot; argument in the request.  If there is, that &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;mean&lt;/span&gt;s this request is coming from the OpenID provider.  On the first try it&#039;s no&#10;" size="7167" wordcount="1160" timestamp="2014-08-17T00:18:09Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>