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>
    <searchinfo totalhits="1" />
    <search>
      <p ns="0" title="Special Sessions" snippet="...er time step. However, modern sensors have increasingly higher resolution, &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; that it is common to see multiple detections per object. For example, this &#10;" size="24732" wordcount="3362" timestamp="2016-06-29T09:36:41Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>