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="CouchDB" snippet="...volve. With CouchDB, no schema is required, so new document types with new &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt; can be safely added alongside the old. However, for applications requiring &#10;...10, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0]. For all you care, this is just a change in syntax, not &lt;span class=&#039;searchmatch&#039;&gt;meaning&lt;/span&gt;. But it shows you the power of views. Not only can you construct an index w&#10;" size="604083" wordcount="85363" timestamp="2015-01-04T00:30:32Z" />
    </search>
  </query>
</api>