I suppose people are upvoting the title, which is in English ("Google buys the German Groupon competitor DailyDeal") rather than the linked web page. If I had submitted this, I would have been tempted not to submit the URL but rather to put the URL somewhere "underneath" the title (e.g., in a comment) with a note saying that the purpose of the URL is to provide evidence of the truth of the title -- much like the purpose of a citation in a scholarly article -- in an attempt to signal to the reader that I was not advising that the average reader to read the linked page. However such a submission seems to go against the implication in the instructions on http://news.ycombinator.com/submit that the purpose of a URL-less submission is "to submit a question for discussion".